Business and Personal Gadgets for use in Second Life. You can expect useful tips, tricks, commentary, Q&A, and the occasional product update announcement.

Tag Archives: experience

Customer satisfaction is a factor that can make or break a business. Satisfied customers can potentially recommend products and services to others and become repeat customers. On the other hand, dissatisfied customers may never or rarely provide repeat business, and might even tell others about their dissatisfaction. This is why to alleviate things that irritate your customer, one should solicit product feedback.

The need to identify the areas customers may be having a less than satisfying experience is very important. How satisfied customers are with a particular physical characteristics such as functionality, prims, script load, and aesthetics of the product that they purchased? Identify the functionality that the product provides and have customers rate each aspect of its functionality separately on an even-numbered scale so that there is no neutral option available. Some businesses will create a notecard with a series of check-off boxes in it for this purpose, others might use an in-world survey kiosk or a web site.

Soliciting product feedback when the product you require feedback on is not really a physical product, but instead customer service and support offerings, is not quite as straightforward. One must examine sales and service to identify areas where customers may be experiencing a degree of dissatisfaction. It is difficult to ask open ended questions to identify these areas from customers, since most customers will not take the time to answer open ended questions, even though this type of information is the most useful form of feedback for a business.

The perception of how much effort is used to create a quality store environment can affect whether prospective visitors turn into a paying customer or whether they teleport away never to be seen again. Three of the factors that may apply to store quality include the arrangement of prims (i.e. textures, sizes, and organization) in the store, information visible on signs (i.e. pop-up notices and store policies), as well as parcel settings (i.e. name, media, restrictions).

The arrangement of prims can set the tone of the store depending on whether they appear to be rezzed in an organized fashion or scattered around the store at odd angles. Textures used in the store should be something other than the default of plywood and plain at a high enough resolution to show details, but not so high that it takes a long time for the texture to come into view. Alpha textures can be viewed from all angles to ensure there are no glitches and non-alpha textures at the same level overlap with each other resulting in the viewer randomly toggling between the two (sometimes referred to as flickering).

The purpose of signs in a store is to be informational without being too intrusive meaning landmarks and notecards are to be offered to the visitor only once, not every time they happen to walk into the sensor area. Store policies such as return, custom orders, post-sale support, and gifting options need to be clearly visible and available. Finally, any vendors that dispense a product needs to include not only the price of the item, but also the number of prims required and permissions allowed.

Parcel settings can either enhance the shopping experience or hinder it. For example, if the parcel is set to no-scripts then the chances of lag affecting avatars is minimized, but setting no-scripts might also disallow visitors from using their favorite HUD. Media settings such as music and sounds cannot conflict with each other, if there are sounds that you want the visitor to hear then a music stream playing at the same time may result in them not hearing the intended sound. Finally, the name of the parcel and description should be informative enough so that if the visitor decides to create their own landmark (rather than accepting yours) it will be informative when they are looking through their inventory window later.

It is important to know when a product includes all of the desired features and is ready for release. Sometimes, this can lead to spending excessive time perfecting it only to realize that the extra time spend on such perfection might not have been worth the effort. The longer time is spent perfecting a product for release may result in missed sales opportunities.

Insisting on releasing perfect products can lead to frustration and disappointment because there is no such as a perfect product. The common cliche that you “can satisfy some people some of the time, but you cannot satisfy everybody all of the time” consistently holds true. When choosing which features to include in a product, one must consider the time and effort required to implement it in exchange for the increased (or lack thereof) sales that results from it.

During the finalization of a product there will always be tweaking involved based on both internal testing and possibly from external beta testers. However, as each new product is released you will gain experience to know when to stop making adjustments and when to just finish creating the product so it can be marketed.

Knowing when to stop perfecting is important for both product development as well as individual projects even when the project does not originate from you. External requests, sometimes referred to as contract work, will have strict deadlines and milestones that must be accomplished along the way which can all be reasonably satisfied without being “perfect”.